We’ve been using iTunes Match pretty much since the beginning, but recently my wife has turned it off and refused to re-subscribe. I’m fast getting to the same place. It just seems so unstable, wishing Apple would invest some of their billions into it. I read with dismay how many people find Google Play to be so much better. As I write this I see a “Cannot connect to iTunes store” on my iPhone. Noting wrong with our connection … it’s alive and well.
Bearing in mind that I have two Macs, an iPhone and an iPad and my wife has a Mac, iPhone and iPad what we really want is the following.
I want all our music to go up to one location (iCloud or even better our own server). I want an app or web app that I see on the right hand side a list of artists or albums (or playlists) and columns for each device. I want to be able to tick the “matrix” to specify which devices the artist/album/playlist should be downloaded to. When the device is switched on, it must download (no fuss no bother and no stupid I-can’t-do-anything-about error message). A nice enhancement would be to specify three options for each entity (Download, Stream, Not Available). There must be options to easily bulk select.
So … is there such a thing out there?
In my immediate family plus spouses and kids girlfriends/boyfriends there are 11 Macs, three iPads and 10 iPhones. My brothers are very similar. I have nieces and nephews that use Apple. My parents also use Apple. Collectively, we have a bunch of Apple equipment.
Best Answer
I had some kind of similar question here.
I decided to go my own route, because basically everything from big companies is specific to their environment. And even though it required some work, I ended up with a solution I am quite happy with.
I have a Mac Server and a DynDNS service.
I have a Madsonic Instance running, which is a fork of Subsonic.
Subsonic has a lot of Apps that can be used for streaming.
Madsonic (and any other fork) is compatible to those clients.
Subsonic wants 1$ per month, if you want to use streaming (via Apps),
Madsonic (and most other forks) do not.
The Web-UI is awesome and there are also other Web-Clients like JamStash ,
that I love to use personally.
Besides the Subsonic Setup, I have a very cleaned up iTunes Library that has Home-Sharing enabled and can sync via Wifi with my iPhone. Also including my purchases.
iTunes requires a lot of attention and maintenance as I discovered recently;
and I would not recommend to let iTunes manage the Library itself.
Instead I wrote some scripts (and found some)
to make maintaining my Library a lot easier
I decided to build up a Folder Structure, that I like
and only let iTunes reference those files, but never touch them directly (except for metadata).
Subsonic does not care about the management, it simply searches for new media every day/week/month (as you wish) in a folder and updates the library.
However, all of that requires a lot of work. If you are lazy or you simply do not care that mouch about Music, You should use another Service besides iTunes Match, as other Users also suggested (Amazon Cloud/Spotify/Ecoute/...)
From where we stand today, I am very sure, that there is no solution to a good music-streaming service that we seek.